GOP Can Learn Abortion Lesson from Methodist Infighting
Republicans must remain the pro-life party.
The post GOP Can Learn Abortion Lesson from Methodist Infighting appeared first on The American Conservative.
GOP Can Learn Abortion Lesson from Methodist Infighting
Republicans must remain the pro-life party.
Before my United Methodist Church began its final descent into theological madness, disparate elements were trying to drag it left or right on various issues through the denomination’s messy democratic process. Nowhere was this more apparent than on abortion.
The church was an early adopter of the “prayerfully pro-choice” position before Roe v. Wade, but its teachings were gradually revised in a more pro-life direction over time as the more conservative Methodists organized to fight back against leftward drifts. This included opposition to abortion as a form of birth control, recognition of at least potential fetal personhood, and eventually support for banning partial-birth abortion.
Despite this incremental improvement, the Methodist social principles on abortion even at their best were a bit of a muddled mess. Of course, that is true of public opinion about abortion in general and is what you would expect of compromise language written for people with divergent views.
This brings us to the newly revised GOP platform in which the pro-life plank is, if not quite gutted, the most equivocal it has been since 1976, when it truly was a compromise between Republicans on different sides of the abortion debate, after the convention fight between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Ford and Jimmy Carter went into the general election with relatively nuanced positions on abortion by today’s standards, with the parties not really sorting on the issue until Reagan won four years later.
The former President Donald Trump recognizes that Democrats have successfully branded any federal legislation on abortion post-Roe as a “national ban” or “federal ban” on abortion. This is true even when the public supports the details of the actual bill in question, which is a problem because they do oppose a blanket “national ban.”
Trump is eager to avoid this problem. He therefore wishes to avoid federal legislation on the topic and rebrand the Democrats as extremist defenders of late-term abortion. I think Trump is generally correct as a matter of short-term political strategy and that abortion lawmaking cannot be as divorced from public opinion as judicially imposed abortion policy was for nearly 50 years of Roe.
Where Trump goes off the rails is in his conceit that some final Art of the Deal compromise can be reached on abortion. The mixture of federalism and the Fourteenth Amendment makes the abortion plank incoherent, which could be forgiven as a matter of democratic haggling finally allowed by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and also likely to inflame both sides.
States possess police powers under the Constitution. That is the proper level of government to regulate abortion as a practice that involves the taking of innocent human life. The laws that protect magazine editors and political columnists from homicide are largely enacted at the state level. But, under the Fourteenth Amendment, a state legalizing the killing of magazine editors and political columnists would be problematic.
A better approach would be for the Republican platform to explicitly oppose abortion except in cases of rape, incest, and when the mother’s life is in danger without specifying the level of government that should enact this policy. This has been Trump’s formal position on abortion since circa 2016 and that of every Republican presidential nominee since Reagan.
The plank should take a victory lap on the reversal of Roe, which could also justify the deletion of the human life amendment endorsement. Here you could talk up states getting back the power to legislate abortion.
One problem with this is that the Fourteenth Amendment language was obviously the get for the big pro-life groups, even if it is simultaneously the hook Democrats are using to claim Republicans still support a federal ban on abortion without appeasing grassroots pro-life activists who are demoralized by the platform.
Party platforms are mainly symbolic, but it is still important to avoid the GOP drifting away from being pro-life. Trump’s mifepristone stance, for example, is a troubling substantive rather than strategic concession. But it is also likelier that a Democratic White House and Congress will pass a bill “codifying Roe” that negates many state-level pro-life laws than the same combinations of Republicans getting a 15-week ban across the finish line.
Eventually, most conservatives decided to leave the United Methodist Church and now it is free to let its freak flag fly on abortion. While a church is more important than a political party, that’s hopefully not a window into the Republican future.
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